Past Time For Peace
by Anna Nigma
Summary: .The Memory Keeper's Daughter. Years later Nora could still remember the exact moment her marriage died. David goes missing, comes home, and finally sets Nora free. Even if he doesn't realize it.


**Disclaimer: Not mine. I simply like to meddle.**

**A/N: Yet another thing written for my Contemporary Lit. Class. I wrote this about a year ago but only got around to uploading it now. **

_Men marry because they are tired; women because they are curious. Both are disappointed._

_-Oscar Wilde_

**Past Time For Peace**

**1982**

Missing. David was missing. He had gone to Pittsburgh to speak at a museum that was showing his photographs and now he had simply disappeared. Somehow, in front of a crowd of several hundred made up of critics, fans and the event staff he had vanished and no one seemed to know where he was. Out of all of those people not one of them had seen her husband leave or had any clue as to where he had gone. The only information anyone had was that he had met up with an old friend at the event whom he had not seen in years, an old _female _friend.

Nora sighed and wondered why David had to choose this week to have his mid-life crisis. She knew that the thought was uncharitable and she would feel horrible about it later if it turned out that something had happened to him but right now she was simply too angry to care. She honestly didn't know what to do anymore. David had been distant for years but at least he had always been reliable, rational almost to the point of being cold, and now when she needed those qualities most he just wasn't there.

Bree was sick. Sick in a way that she might never recover from. She had a tumor, small thankfully, but still there, still malignant. Just the thought of it made her stomach clench in fear while her fists clenched in anger.

She felt like an idiot. Her first thought after hearing the diagnosis was that David would know what to do. He would understand everything that the doctor was saying, would be able to do more then nod numbly and agree. He would handle the situation the way he always did. He would be calm, he would be rational, he would be distant. He would be there. He would know who to call and who to talk to and who the best doctor was and would get Bree an appointment within days. If David was asking there would be no waiting list. And so for the first time since very early in their marriage Nora allowed herself to something she had vowed not to do years ago, rely completely on David.

It had been a mistake. She had called his hotel only to find, not her husband, but his hysterical agent and several police officers. Missing, they told her, since last night, almost twenty-four hours, and did she have any idea where he could be? She didn't, but they had told her not to worry that he hadn't been gone for that long and they were sure he was fine. But it had been three days now and worry, no matter how angry she was, was inevitable.

She could hear Paul moving around upstairs in his room and was relieved that he had decided to go to bed at a semi-decent time without a large amount of effort required on her part. Paul, she thought, that was another problem. Paul and Bree were very close and she had no idea how she was going to break the news to him. She hadn't had the heart to do it yet. Paul had enough to worry about right now with his father's sudden vanishing act and did not need to worry about the other people in his life vanishing too.

Nora turned her head, broken out of her thoughts by the sound of a car crunching on the gravel of the driveway. It was probably the police. Maybe they had finally found something. This thought prompted a swell of emotions that ranged from fear to hope to anger and she worked on quelling those emotions as she waited for the doorbell to ring. It did not. Instead she heard the sound of a key scraping in the lock. She shot off the couch where she had been sitting and turned around fast enough to pull something in her neck.

The door opened and through it walked David, though for a moment she was not sure _who_ it was. He was a mess. She suspected, from the depth and number of the wrinkles, that he was wearing the same clothes now that he had been when he disappeared from the museum three days ago. He did not seem to have found the time to shave in that time either and looked scruffier than she had ever seen him.

However the thing that made her forget all of the worry she had apparently wasted on him was the expression on his face. He looked, if not precisely happy then at least more at peace then he had been since Phoebe had died. What she saw next made Nora catch her breath and instantly changed all the frustration and worried anger that she had felt over the past three days into an overwhelming, bitter fury. A girl, barely more than a child dressed just as raggedly as her husband. Who even in her too big, tattered clothing seemed to _glow_.

Nora knew that glow, remembered it. She had seen it in the mirror every day for nine months almost nineteen years ago. She glanced at the girl's stomach and knew, suddenly, terribly, that she had been right. She felt her fury grow, larger and more bitter, spreading to encompass the nameless girl. Nora knew many things in that moment. That she hated the girl, that she hated David, that whatever was left of slowly dying her marriage had finally, finally perished. And yes in that last rational corner of her mind that held up under the fury, she knew that the baby was not David's. But what anger could not conquer jealousy did. Her last shreds of rational thought failed her as she watched her husband give a small, tired, but completely sincere smile to the girl.

As Nora rose to confront her husband she felt an odd flash of peace that seemed entirely out of place in the maelstrom of negative emotions that had overrun her body. Yet it made an odd sort of sense. This would be the last time David would make her feel like so horrible. Paul would be leaving for college in a matter of months and once he had she'd have one of the company's layers send her the papers. David seemed to have found his peace it was past time that she found hers.

**A/N: I hope you enjoyed my poor attempts at playing around in another author's world.**

**Reviews are both appreciated and adored, most especially ones that include constructive criticism although all types are certainly welcome. **

**: ) **


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